January 7, 2011

Who is A. Leo Weil?

For one thing, he's the guy who you can thank when you tune into a Pittsburgh City Council meeting and you're only hearing from nine councilors instead of 100 (yeah, there used to be 100 members of City Council).

I have to admit that I had never heard of this remarkable reformer until the current Council unanimously declared 2011 to be “The Year of A. Leo Weil” in the City of Pittsburgh and I wrote about the man here.

His story shines a light on a really fascinating chapter in Pittsburgh politics (with a dash of "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose")..

"'Ole A. Leo Weil *should* have said 'No Democrats' or 'No Liberals' or 'No Incestuos Politicians' or 'No One with a Union Member in Their Family'."

I assume you either did not go to the link or you ignored the part there where it explained how Council went from 100 members to 9 members because of a huge scandal and that scandal was back when the city was ruled by a REPUBLICAN machine.

You forget to begin by apologizing for the manner in which conservatives and Republicans invaded the wrong country, sent thousands of American soldiers to needless deaths, and maimings, botched the attempted occupation, turned surplus into deficit, let bin Laden get away, squandered our principles and prestige, got our asses kicked in Iraq, let Afghanistan drift into a deadly quagmire, and in sum broke our country.

(You also handed control of your party to religious kooks, gun nuts, anti-abortion crybabies and zealots and bigots, but no need to apologize for that. The scum you choose to associate with is your business.)

If you don't have the decency to apologize for the consequences of conservative failings, your whining about liberals and Democrats will find it hard to register -- at least, with reality-based readers.

And you turned it into a jab at liberals and Democrats in general. displaying -- at least until we claw ourselves out of the military and economic holes created by Republicans and conservatives -- betrays a stunning lack of self-awareness.